Perspective:
Let me begin by being clear that yes, everything I am about to present, and have presented, is just more conditioning. But I ask that as you approach this with a beginner’s mind, you ask one question as we go along, “does this intuitively make sense?” Intuition, a gut feeling, is the knowledge of consciousness for lack of a better definition. It is the understanding that arises when thoughts subside, conditioning ceases to exist. It is your true knowledge which serves to evaluate concepts and sift through them for truth.
The mind, as I see it, is ALL we see and experience. It is the world around us woven on the fabric of space and governed by the movement of time. It is our family and friends as much as it is the thoughts which move constantly through our awareness like fallen leaves floating down a river in front of us. It is that which governs our “re-actions” as we go through life. Or in most cases, it is those thoughts and individuals that governed the “re-actions” we wish we had not had (the past) or those we are fearful we will have to take (the future).
The mind is the “not this, not that ” from the perspective of consciousness. It is from where duality arises, where you acquire a body. It is what is born and what dies, has an ego and a story. It serves one purpose and one purpose alone, to enable you, consciousness (the “I”) to experience itself; to take a localized point of perspective and through the senses and emotions of that point, that body, experience what it is to see, hear, feel, taste, and emote. It is the unavoidable equal and opposite to consciousness, which when known, experienced, is what we refer to as “living.”
Equal and Opposite
The term “equal and opposite” is quite important in our understanding of the relationship between consciousness and mind. To explore this further, consider a situation where a friend has suffered complete memory loss and relies on you to explain to them how to light a fire. Within this lesson comes the need to explain to them the dangers of fire and the risks associated with the extreme levels of heat produced by the flame. How would you explain the word “hot?” More specifically, how would you explain it without using equally trivial words to conceptualize it? The answer is that you couldn’t, other than saying it is the opposite of cold, which is the only efficient way to define the word “hot.” Of course, in this example, the word “cold” would be equally trivial for both need to be defined through experience, and that is truly the point.
Again, to understand hot, you must understand cold; to know on, you must know off; to understand light, you must know dark; and vice versa. To understand consciousness, you must know the mind; neither can exist without the other. All of these examples, other than perhaps consciousness and mind, are likely readily known to you. When did you learn these? For example, did you gain awareness of light and dark when you developed the desire to see your Mother or Father’s face as a child? Did you learn about on and off as part of that same desire because it represented the two positions of the light switch? The point here is, once again, that you did at one point have a beginner’s mind and it was the desire to experience something that enabled the conceptual framework for on and off, light and dark to embed itself within you. This is why you need to return to that state in order to completely embed the mind within you as an experience.
Unfortunately, most have little desire to know or experience the mind because, as a result of not yet knowing it, it is often taught to be somewhat of a cage; a source of potential illness; an enemy in which no weapons can be raised against or if failing to be “bright,” makes you less than your pears. Of course, there are those people we consider lucky enough to have had “bright minds,” those we often envy. But again, in these examples, the mind is localized to being a part of that individual. But even if we were to accept that for a moment, we would see that an individual like Albert Einstein, considered by most to be the brightest mind of all time, not only contributed significantly to our understanding of the universe, but understood that there were falsely perceived barriers in the reality we operate within; barriers which arise from our failure to appreciate the mind and its role in our experience. In fact, Albert Einstein once stated, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” This statement is in fact, quite true.
So, with that, I would like to explore this illusion based on the perspective that the mind is actually our ally in a sense. The mind is experience and shapes and shifts our individual point of perspective so that we can have a true experience of who we are in all our complexity, beauty, connectivity and oneness. The mind holds this persistent reality together for the exact amount of time we need before we return to consciousness, the “not this, not that,” the unavoidable equal and opposite, having truly “lived and died” blissfully.
